A game where the goal is to “earn liberties,” and where building a space of one’s own is more useful than seeking confrontation with the adversary, had to appeal to libertarians of every stripe. But beyond the metaphors, the story of the arrival of Go in the libertarian world reveals unsuspected connections between some of the great intellectual figures of the twentieth century.

What’s interesting is that there’s some truth to that. Ultimately, the main precursor of the game in England was none other than Alan Turing. While directing the famous team that would decipher the Enigma machine and create Colossus, the first computer in history, he was playing almost daily. The scene of Turing studying the goban [board], or inviting others to play, became so common that today, in Bletchley Park, his old office is decorated with a board and two baskets of stones. That was where he taught a young mathematician from Oxford to play: I. J. Good, who would continue working — and playing — with Turing after the war in the famous studio in Manchester where The Baby and Mark 1, the first civilian computers, would be born.

He is considered the successor to Turing’s work, and we owe Good things as important as the Fast Fourier transform, surely the most used algorithm in history. Beyond informatics and Baysian statistics, the truth is that he had an interesting life, including milestones like the first theorization of the “technological singularity” and having advised Kubrick on HAL and the information systems in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

The curiosity awakened by the article materialized in dozens of clubs, almost all linked to university environments in which the student movements of ’68 were brewing. The famous Arabist Robert Irwintells in his memoir how “the craze for the Japanese game of Go was at its height,” and his alter ego, Harvey, star of the moment in the “Oxford Anarchist Society” teaches him to play and use shi, the logic of encircling, as a way of approaching discussions of all kinds.

Although manuals had already been published in French, the book unleashes the interest of the young French intellectuals of the times, who take Go as symbolic of otherness, of the opposite of thought of traditional power symbolized by chess.

Years later, Deleuze and Guattari, who had seen a goban for the first time at Perec’s home, will pick up this Perecian and spirit-of-’68 idea of the otherness of Go, in one of the most important books of libertarian European thought at the end of the century, “A Thousand Plateaus” (1980):

Chess is a game of State, or court; the Emperor of China practiced it. Chess pieces are codified, they have an internal nature or intrinsic properties, from which their movements, their positions, their confrontations are derived. They are qualified, the horse is always a horse, the bishop a bishop, the pawn a pawn. Each one is like a subject of enunciation, gifted with a relative power; and those relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, the chess player, or the form of inner self of the game.

The pawns in Go, on the contrary, are balls, cards, simple arithmetic units, whose sole function is anonymous, collective or third-person: “It” advances — it could be man, a woman, a flea, or an elephant. The pawns in Go are the elements of a non-subjectivized mechanical agency, without intrinsic properties, but only situational. The relationships are also very different in the two cases. In their means of inwardness, the chess pieces maintain two-way relationships with each other, and with the adversary : their functions are structural. A pawn in Go, on the contrary, only has means of outwardness, or extrinsic relationships with cloudy consteallations, according to which it carries out functions of insertion or situation, like bordering, surrounding, breaking. A single pawn in Go can synchronously annihilate a whole constellation, while one chess piece cannot (or can only do it diachronically).

Chess is clearly a war, but an insitutionalized, regulated, codified war, with a front, a rearguard, and battles. What is unique about Go, on the other hand, is that it is a war without battlelines, without confrontation and rearguard, and in the ultimate extreme, without battle: pure strategy, while chess is semiotics. Finally, it is not about space itself: in the case of the chess, it is a game of distributing a closed space, hence, of going from one point to another, of occupying a maximum of squares with a minimum of pieces. Go is a game of being distributed in a open space, of occupying the space, of conserving the possibility of emerging at any point: movement no longer goes from one point to another, but rather becomes perpetual, without goal or destination, without departure or arrival.

Smooth space of Go versus striated space of chess. Nomos of Go versus State of chess, nomos versus polis. Because chess codifies and decodifies space, while Go proceeds in another way, territorializing and desterritorializing it (turning the exterior into a territory in space, consolidating that territory through the construction of a second adjacent territory, deterritorializing the enemy through the internal rupture of their territory, deterritorializing oneself by retreating, going somewhere else…). Another justice, another movement, another space-time.

The Internet era

In the ’80s and ’90s, in Europe and the US, Go no longer depended on concrete people to develop. It was a minority cultural element within a minority. But that excentric and often erudite minority, almost always university-associated and technophile, was fermenting in something new: hacker culture, which, in turn, was going to shape a good part of the new world that would come with the Internet. When, in the second half of the ’90s, HTML and the newborn World Wide Web opened the tap of massive socialization of the new medium, Go gained a sudden visibility simply because the percentage of Internet users who are players is far above the average in the population.

And thus, in November 2013, The Go’ing Insurrection appears, the little book that is fashionable among afficionados right now. Anonymously written, its title is an homage to The Arriving Insurrection (or The Coming Insurrection, depending on the translation), the famous and polemic post-Tiqqun text attributed to Joulien Coupat, to whom, however, it owes little beyond a few quotes: the idea that in politics, as in Go, territory is a relational concept, not spatial or scenic, does not begin with Coupat, but is, rather, commonplace in non-nationalist European thought since Walter Benjamin. In any case, the result is forty very suggestive pages, and recommended for anyone regardless of their ideology.

Go and the interesting life

The idea of Go as a school, or at least as a strategic language to think in terms of liberties and conflict resolution, surely has won more people over to Go than to libertarian ideas.

What’s true is that the game of Go is a terrain on which new situations and problems are constantly presented in an intellectually elegant manner. To solve them, to learn, to create knowledge for the pleasure of knowing, is doubtlessly more than enough motivation in itself. According to Desmond Morris, to learn, to discover, is the pleasure that evolution taught us to enjoy so that we would be able to adapt to the medium without having to wait millions of years to see if mutations responded better or not.

Surely that is the truth underneath the old Chinese saying that “no Go player is a bad person.” A game so abstract generates a kind of knowledge that is so hard to instrumentalize, that it necessarily raises a contradiction between the political will to impose on others, and the personal pleasure of an interesting life. You have to be a bit of an anarchist to be able to incorporate Go into your life. And if you like it because you’ve turned the desire to learn into the engine of your actions, it’s more than likely that you also have a minimalist in you, and you’re not very interested in fighting over resources or wealth with anyone.